


Safe

by Yevynaea



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst and Feels, Mentions of Suicide, Minor Character Death, One Shot, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, also Koz is psychic??, basically everyone is a zombie okay, not awful and nothing is described in horrifying detail but there's some bad stuff mentioned, scary but has a semi-happy ending i guess, sort of??, this is pretty dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yevynaea/pseuds/Yevynaea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kozmotis had been born with an unusual gift; he could look any person in the eyes and know their story. He knew their thoughts, opinions, past, and future, just from one glance. He never thought of it as a good thing, not after the dead started rising from their graves and coming after the living and everyone spent more time wondering why than trying to stop it. Every once and a while he’d hear a moan or a shuffling footstep and he’d whirl around with whatever weapon he had on hand at the ready. And he’d meet their soulless gaze and see for a moment what they used to be, before they were turned."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe

Kozmotis Pitchiner hated his mind. He hated the ability it had to keep him awake all hours of the night even when he was relatively protected in a safe-house, surrounded by other people all armed to the teeth and willing to work together to fight off the dead that would inevitably catch their scent. He hated that when he looked into the dark he saw monsters that weren't there, leading him to believe sometimes that the real ones weren't there either. He hated that it reminded him so often of his failures but never of his successes. He hated what it could do.

Kozmotis had been born with an unusual gift; he could look any person in the eyes and know their story. He knew their thoughts, opinions, and past, just from one glance. Learning to hide his gift had been a quick lesson, learned when he was only a few years old and had asked his Mother why she feared her father so much, even though she'd never said or hinted at anything about the pain she'd been caused as a child. When he was in school Koz hated his power, thought it troublesome that he was so different from the other children, so strange.

Then he grew up a bit, and moved to America for college. As a young man, then eventually as a young father, he thought of his powers as a gift. At that time he saw his ability as a way to keep his family safe from every danger. He thought he could protect them.

But then there was the war. Kozmotis came back scarred and haunted, unable to look his fellow soldiers in the eye; those that had returned with him. Because in their eyes he saw his own fears and nightmares, and the gift was once again a curse.

He never thought of it as a good thing again, not after the dead started rising from their graves and coming after the living and everyone spent more time wondering why than trying to stop it. Not after he watched helplessly as his wife was infected, and he dragged his daughter away from her mother in the midst of a terrifying scene of fire and blood and screaming and death. And never again after Seraphina had taken a knife to her own throat because he was too heartbroken to stop denying the existence of the ugly bite mark on her shoulder. He burned her body, at her own insistence, so that she wouldn’t turn. So that he wouldn’t have to kill her.

He fought and survived and helped other people on the way to a rumored “safe-town” in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the hopes it wouldn’t be overrun with the dead when they got there. The group he led lost almost a dozen members somewhere in Pennsylvania, though, and the rest left him to make their own way in the belief that he was just a crazy heartbroken veteran who wouldn’t lead them anywhere except to their deaths.

So Koz continued on his own, always careful never to look one of the turned in the eye. Because his gift still worked on them, and it was so much easier to cope with killing them to ensure his own survival when they were mindless monsters after his flesh. But if he looked them in the eye he could still see who they had been, how humans had been turned into nightmarish creatures. And he couldn’t bring himself to kill _people_.

Every once and a while, however, it would still happen. He’d hear a moan or a shuffling footstep and he’d whirl around with whatever weapon he had on hand at the ready. And he’d meet their soulless gaze and see for a moment what they used to be, before they were turned.

_A dentist, living with her daughter, with plans to visit her parents in India over summer vacation until the airports were closed and the two of them were trapped in an infected town with no way out._

_An artist, teased by his friends about his prematurely grey hair and his love of Easter, who was on his way to Colorado and sketching an abandoned building when he didn’t notice the corpses shuffling towards him._

_A mute man who taught sign language classes and ran a charity program that helped troubled kids reach their dreams. He’d been sleeping soundly when the safe-house he was staying in was overrun._

_An old man with a love of books and a strange tendency to talk to bugs. The old man’s adopted son, a thief who became a toymaker and an honest man when the old man fished him out of the foster system. The old man’s daughter, the thief’s sister, an English teacher in their town’s elementary school and an owner of a pet goose that she loved more than anyone believed a goose deserved to be loved. The teacher’s husband, a quiet young man who fought to protect his beloved wife to the bitter end._ (Kozmotis had cried after being forced to kill that last corpse, because at least this man had tried to do something other than run.)

When Koz finally reached the Rockies, he’d seen triple the horrors during his journey than he had during the war. It had taken months to walk from his home in New York state to Colorado, in this world where finding a working car was rare (because everyone had died before they could get gas and all the gas stations were overrun by dead people anyway) and finding someone still alive who had a working car was even rarer.

He kept his machete out, tightly gripped in his hand, as he walked as silently as he could to the blocked mouth of the tunnel leading into town. It was the only way in, and it looked as if it had been blown up, effectively blocking off the path.

“Who goes there?” A young man’s voice called, and Koz startled, looking up to where a guard was standing on top of the ruined tunnel. The man—the boy, really, for how young he looked—had shocking white hair and bright blue eyes that seemed ethereal after months of seeing only the dull grey eyes of the dead. Koz carefully only looked at them for a split second, trying to avoid seeing too much of the boy’s life.

“Not a corpse, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Kozmotis called back, and the boy grinned.

“Didn’t think you were.” The younger man replied. “I just like saying that. Reminds me of the old movies.”

Koz couldn’t help but bark a short laugh at the young man’s liveliness. “Then I suppose this is the part where I introduce myself dramatically?” The boy opened his mouth to answer, but then his jaw smacked shut again and his eyes widened.

Koz knew what he would see when he whirled around even before he heard the shuffling and groaning of the dead, but the boy was already leaping nimbly down from rock to rock to run toward the seven approaching corpses. In one hand the boy held a metal staff, crooked at the end like a shepherd’s staff, and in the other he held a small pistol. Before Kozmotis even had time to wonder how the boy had gotten there so fast, one corpse had gotten its skull bashed in by the butt of the staff, and another had been decapitated by the inside of the crook, somehow. But then one of the remaining infected grabbed the boy from behind, dragging him backwards by his shirt and opening its mouth to bite him…Kozmotis leapt into action, chopping the thing’s arm off to free the boy, then cutting off its head while it was still off balance. The boy didn’t acknowledge the rescue—there wasn’t time. Instead he swung his staff at another of the dead, catching it around the neck with the crook of his staff and tugging sharply. The corpse’s head rolled in one direction and the body rolled in another.

“Not bad, old man!” The boy joked as Koz beheaded another corpse then expertly spun around to attack the one that was trying to sneak up on him.

“I’m not old!” Koz protested indignantly as he watched the boy kill the last corpse. Then almost before he could blink, the boy turned on him, gun raised to point at Koz’s head. His grin was gone and replaced by a cold, blank, mask.

“Take your coat off, please.” The boy said coolly.

“Ah.” Kozmotis said, realizing the reason for the younger man’s sudden change in demeanor. He shrugged off his bloodstained coat, letting the boy look him over for bite marks. It usually took a few days for an infected to fully turn, so it was understandable that they wouldn’t want to let anyone inside the town before making sure they wouldn’t cause an outbreak within the walls. Once the boy had made sure Koz wasn’t infected, he dropped the gun, a grin of relief and mild apology on his face.

“Better safe than sorry, right?” The boy asked, holding his staff over one shoulder as he led the way back to the blocked tunnel.

“Indeed.” Kozmotis followed, sheathing his machete so to have both hands free for climbing over the rocks, but the boy simply used his staff his pull himself up over the edge, leaving Koz to climb up alone.

“Here.” The boy lowered a crudely-made rope ladder over the edge, which didn’t look like it would hold anyone’s weight alone. Koz made it up to the roof of the tunnel by climbing over the rocks and debris and using the ladder to steady himself until he was far enough up that he could pull himself up the last couple of feet. He sat in a cross-legged position and bowed his head, eyes closed and breathing deeply as the last of the adrenaline faded from the earlier fight. “My name’s Jack, by the way. Jack Frost.”

Koz looked up in surprise at the sound of the boy’s voice so close to his face. When he looked up, golden eyes met blue and both were quick to look away, Kozmotis gasping sharply and the boy stumbling to keep his balance. Each man’s reaction had the other pause and look at each other in confusion, still not looking each other in the eyes.

“Wait, can you…?” Jack didn’t finish his question, instead dropping his head and letting out a breathy laugh. “Man, you’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“So have you.” Kozmotis retorted, feeling the smallest bit of joy spring to life somewhere in his jaded heart. _I’m not alone,_ a tiny part of him whispered with relief.

“Not nearly as much.” Jack admitted, shaking his head. “I thought--”

“That there was no one else who could do the things we can.” Koz finished for him, and Jack smiled, almost sadly.

“Yeah.” He confirmed, then brightened and held out a hand to help Kozmotis stand up, slowly moving his eyes up until they were looking each other in the eye again. This time neither man looked away, because there was no reason to; Koz couldn’t read anything from Jack this time. “There is actually another man that can do it; the leader of town. Manny Lunar. He taught me how to hide certain thoughts and control it to an extent, but he’s really not that willing to just talk about stuff.”

“You can control it?” Koz breathed, almost unwilling to believe such a thing could be possible.

“When I have time to prepare. Just now you looked up and it caught me off guard, but usually it’s easy for me to not read people, or to hide things I don’t want seen, just in case.” Jack admitted. “Like my name.”

“But you just told me—Jack Frost is an alias. Of course.” Kozmotis wanted to smack himself for not noticing the obviously-fake name.

“Lots of people have fake names around here, actually. They rename themselves to leave behind the people and they were before and all their sob-stories. Or to hide from anyone still alive that might want them dead. Some just change it because their name doesn’t fit who they are anymore. They can’t go back to being the person they were before the infection started.”

“I see.” Koz racked his brain, trying to think of something to call himself, because Jack was right; after everything, _‘Kozmotis Pitchiner’_ didn’t feel like who he was anymore. Then he thought of something. Cheesy, yes but it would serve its purpose. “Pitch Black.” He introduced himself, holding one hand out. Jack took it and gave it a quick shake before turning away, motioning for Koz—no, _Pitch—_ to follow him across the tunnel’s roof to the other side.

When they reached the other end of the tunnel and looked out over the town beyond, Pitch almost dropped to his knees at the beauty of it. If the world was still the same as it had been a few years ago, he wouldn’t have been impressed by a town like this, tiny and probably with too many people for the small number of houses, with a community orchard and a vegetable garden in one corner, a fenced in area full of livestock in the other, and a tiny greenhouse through the glass roof of which he could see what looked like bananas and oranges. It was bustling with people though, _living_ people, and they were doing so much more than just surviving on whatever food they could find and fighting for their lives every day.

Jack chuckled from beside him, no doubt at Pitch’s dumbstruck expression, and then he sighed contentedly and looked sideways at the taller man. Gesturing to the town at large, he said,

“Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> So yes all the corpses whose pasts Koz saw are the Guardians (minus Jack & MiM of course) In order of "appearance": Tooth, Bunny, Sandy, Ombric, North, Katherine, and Nightlight.


End file.
